


Anchor

by pprfaith



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doom (2005), The Chronicles of Riddick Series
Genre: Angst and Humor, Buffy Insert, Covers Chronicles of Riddick, Dark, Death, F/M, Gallows Humor, Gore, Immortality, Immortals, Insanity, M/M, No Beta, People not dealing well with immortality, Post-Movie, Post-Series, Stream of Consciousness, Unreliable Narrator, Violence, i really have no idea how to tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-09
Updated: 2017-10-09
Packaged: 2019-01-15 05:31:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12314721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: Buffy Summers and John Grimm, adrift in space until a certain Furyan enters stage left, blades swinging.(My first triple crossover. I'm so proud.)





	Anchor

**Author's Note:**

> I have wanted to write something for Riddick since I saw the 2004 movie. In the actual year 2004. I must have started a dozen different stories and this one, for all its flakey, exposition-y-ness, is the first one I ever finished. And look, Buffy and Reaper are there, too. 
> 
> Not quite sure what to make of the story, except that I like it and I haven't written anything I like in months and months, so here, have it. 
> 
> Also, this probably won't stand alone for long.

+

When Harry meets Sally, Harry’s name is John and Sally’s is Buffy and it’s not an eighties romcom so much as it’s two car crashes passing in the night. 

Something like that. 

Buffy might be mixing her metaphors. It happens. 

She’s in her eighties, looking like a child, and he’s a man masquerading as a much younger man and they look at each other across a dirty, smelly, overcrowded bar and they just _know_. It’s the look in the eye, the weight across the shoulders, the expression on their faces as they watch people lifetimes younger than themselves live and live and live and know nothing of the horrors that wait just beyond the light. 

Modern medicine did to him what magic did to her and once they discover that little fact, she can’t quite help the dark smirk that crosses her face. 

“It’s about the blood,” she tells him, confidently, and somehow, _somehow_ , he gets it. Smirks right back. 

Because once upon a time, in a cemetery filled with monsters and ghosts, an almost sister cast dark magic on a grave, doe’s blood and snake venom, and elsewhere, later, after, a more-than-almost sister shot the perfect drug into his veins, blood and blood and blood, monster or angel, and they died and didn’t and now here they are, long lost to time, still looking like the children they were. 

“True,” he says, and buys the first round.

+

They leave it at that, in the beginning. 

She still has grand nieces and nephews and he has a sister with greying hair and a quicksilver tongue and they file the fact that there’s someone else like them away and go about their lives. 

Such as they are.

Buffy slays and leads and trains little girls to go and die and John soldiers in a dozen different wars, throws himself onto grenades and in front of his squadmates and dies quite a lot, really. 

It loses both its appeal and its horror, after a while, until not breathing comes as easy as breathing and brushing their teeth in the morning is only slightly less exciting than another death.

Sam dies, eventually, and Buffy’s descendants forget her name, forget her face as more than a fairy tale and mankind as a whole makes a pretty passable attempt at killing itself.

They meet in a dozen war theatres, sallow with radiation poisoning that never sticks and too many rations passed on to people who can actually, you know, _die_.

Sometimes they’re on the same side. Sometimes they’re not. Usually, it doesn’t matter either way. 

+

“You know,” he tells her, one night, sleeping bags zipped together and a dying moon hanging overhead, “I was meant to be a protector. Sam gave me the C-24 because she wanted me to be _good_.”

There’s blood caked under his nails and at least seven weapons on his body, even now. They killed two dozen people between them today and neither of them knows which side they were on. Hell, neither of them knows if there are even sides left. Mostly, they just kill what tries to kill them.

Buffy pats him on the arm, buries her face in his neck and says, “I was supposed to be _dead_. How do you think I feel?”

+

Eventually, the moon really does die. Well. If you can call ‘getting shot out of the sky and falling into Earth’s orbit like the fucking fist of god’ anything as bland as ‘dying’. 

(But then, dying probably does seem a little more exciting to people who are not them.)

Because apparently exploding the moon seems like a good idea to some of the humans left on this diseased, radiation-riddled formerly-blue marble. Not like the moon is necessary, or anything. Or like it’s goddamn dangerous. No, sir. Everything is peachy. 

“So, I’m thinking taking the last transport off world would be way too much of a cliché, so we’re not doing that,” Buffy tells John as she runs into him in a fallout shelter in what was once Tokyo, almost twenty years since they saw each other last. They split their rations and their water and went in opposite directions, because dying was too easy when they were together and life far too hard. 

Secret sharing time: they’re not good for each other. 

But if she has to leave this planet, has to leave home, for the last time, she can’t imagine doing it without him by her side. 

There is a man with his arm wrapped around John and two teenagers huddled at their feet. They make a cute family. 

“Buffy,” John sighs, rubs his temples. 

She flops onto the bench next to him, hooks her chin over his free shoulder and holds out a data pad for him to look at. “So I got us room on the second to last. It’s leaving in three months and I figure that’s soon enough that there might even be something alive left on this planet to wave at nostalgically as we go. What do you think?”

North America is a smear at the bottom of several dry ocean beds. The coven one of her best friends led for decades has committed ritual suicide last year and the Council is long gone. She met a little girl with lurid pink hair last month and she had the strength of a dozen men and the eyes Buffy’s been seeing in the mirror for centuries. 

When the bombs fell, she didn’t even try to run. 

John’s little found family is looking at her weirdly. She might have said all that out loud. Whoops. 

“Buffy,” he says again. “Not that simple.”

“They can come,” she blurts, too loudly, flinches at her own voice, “Please, Reaper, please, I can’t be here anymore, let’s just _go_.”

She died for this planet, once, twice, a dozen times over and she can’t, won’t, will not watch it burn. Sure she could go alone, no problem, she knows alone, but John is the one familiar face left and she can’t, she can’t, she can’t – 

The teenage girl shuffles sideways, pressing her bony spine into Buffy’s knee and John sighs and tucks her into his chest. The man on his other side takes the pad and starts fiddling with it, seeing how much space she has bought on the ship. Enough for two immortals and all their baggage, she could tell them, or two immortals and three humans. 

Instead she closes her eyes. 

+

So. Space is weird. 

She should have guessed, what with John going there and coming back with an extra chromosome and some really mad skills, but man, space is _weird_. 

For one, there are no aliens. 

Which is a shame. 

Andrew would be hopping mad about that. 

For another, there’s shit like bacteria that eat your face and planets with seven suns and plants that exude actual, no-shitting-you sex pollen. 

John forbids her from ever mentioning that last incident ever again. 

In fact, the whole clusterfuck ends with him impregnating some nice girl from a neighboring colony and he ends up being a nice guy and staying with her and they split for a full century, him and Buffy, and she goes back to the seven suns and gets one hell of a tan. 

He tells her she can stay, but he looks at that girl with her round belly with something in his eyes she hasn’t seen since his last (adopted) kids died, something soft, with room for future regret, and she doesn’t want to see it. So she leaves and takes all the weapons in the house with her, because John is a farmer now, he tells her, and maybe this way, he’ll be able to believe his own lie. Just for a while. Maybe until the kid’s grown. He deserves good things. 

So she leaves. Tan. Yay. She also helps fund a pretty isolationist colony way out on the rim and may or may not accidentally turn it into a warrior culture? 

Double whoops.

+

Buffy is a settler and a soldier and a merc, for a little while, and a settler again, and a merchant and a smuggler and a soldier again and a noble for a hot minute, a body guard and an outlaw. 

Okay, actually, she’s an outlaw a lot. 

The problem with mankind spreading out amongst the stars and procreating like bunny-wabbits is that they are suddenly everywhere and can’t be bothered with central governments anymore. ‘Law’ is pretty much an arbitrary term these days, because every moon has its own and in some places murders is legal as long as you’re related to the victim by blood and in others you get a slap on the wrist for rape but a death sentence for stealing blue space potatoes. 

“Guess they need food more than they need to be decent human beings,” she mutters as she runs and really, who can be bothered to keep track of all that crap?

She sticks around the saner places, sometimes, the ones where rape is a capital crime and stealing food counts as a cry for help, not grounds for execution, and plays law enforcement. But usually, well, no. 

No fucking way. 

So, yeah. Outlaw. She’s got the guns and everything. 

+

She considers doing it John’s way a time or two, falling in love, or at least in like, settling down. Babies are still kind of cute, even when you’re getting on nine hundred. She could totally have a few of them. Name them Dawn, or Willow, or Xander and tell them fairy tales of a long dead planet and the heroes and monsters that lived there. 

But her Summers luck holds and all the men (and a few women) she falls for either die or try to murder her. She grieves and she avenges, she packs her things, climbs on a ship, and runs until her feet are bloody. 

It’s a system, shut up. 

+

“Take me somewhere,” a voice, rough with disuse, orders from behind her and she spins to deliver a swift fist to someone’s face only to pull back at the last second because – 

“Is that a beard or a sentient life form? Jesus, John!”

“Reaper,” he corrects, with a sharpness in his voice she hasn’t heard since before their feet forgot the tread and garavity of their native world. 

She squints at him in the bright sunlight of Lupus I and finds something hard in his eyes. Hard and dead.

Oh. 

Oh. 

She lets Buffy sink into the deep, lets her go to where it’s quiet and there are no cheating lovers, no market days and no rent to pay, and pulls something else into the shallows instead for the first time in a long time. 

Slayer blinks back at Reaper from an eternally twenty-year-old face. “Lead the way,” she says. 

He does. 

+

In the end, it takes thirteen years and at least as many merc crews to finally run them down and _stop them_. 

They die in a hail of bullets and fire and their bodies are never found. 

(“Was it worth it?” she asks, aching with still mending bones and bloody lungs.

“I can’t remember,” he whispers besides her, breath hitching like something’s healing wrong.

She snorts and regrets it immediately. “Good enough,” she concludes.)

+

Once, they live an entire decade on the same planet, running into each other every now and then, and pretending to be perfect strangers every time.

(It’s a relief, acting like they don’t know each other’s deepest, darkest secrets.)

+

“Do you think we’re mad?” John asks, later, when he’s pretending to be a med student and she’s his very blonde girlfriend. 

The joke doesn’t track anymore, blonde is a color like any other, but they still chuckle at it, occasionally.

Buffy pauses in painting her toe nails lurid purple to look at him. “Why?”

He waves a helpless hand, shoves his homework to one side. “We just… we keep going. We’re villains and we’re heroes and we have families and I have children out there and we just-,” he huffs, still more Marine than poet, even after all this time. 

She shrugs and finishes her last toenail with a flourish. “What else are we supposed to do? Sit in a corner and cry?”

“Sometimes,” he muses, playing with a loose thread on his shirt, “I don’t like you very much.”

Her grin feels too sharp on her face, all teeth and no kindness. Off, somehow. Wrong for a med student’s girlfriend, at any rate. 

Maybe it’s times to split again. For a while. 

+

She goes to visit that warrior culture planet and finds someone has named it ‘Furya’. A bit ham-handed, but hey, if they like referring to their homeworld by a name that sounds like something from a video game, Buffy can roll with that. 

Heavy gravity, thin air and a few centuries of selective breeding (and maybe a few demonic traits) have made them all at least as durable as her and John and no-one even bats an eye when she smashes the training grounds with her opponent’s body in a fit of pique. 

Actually, they buy her a few drinks and ask her for stories. 

They’re her kind of people. 

+

His name is Kal and he’s Furyan through and through, and he tells her he loves her between bouts of rigorous fucking on top of his apartment building. 

Stars above her, hot man below her, Buffy smiles down at him and lets herself go just a bit stupid. 

A bit soft. 

(Maybe, she thinks, meeting Kal’s gaze in the dark, she can understand why John keeps doing this to himself.) 

They name their daughter Shani. 

Buffy never does tell her any of those fairy tales. 

+

The next time they meet, John is wearing a merc’s slick badge and Buffy is a payday and their gazes meet without acknowledgement. Strangers.

(“Come here often?” she drawls, trying to draw a knife without him noticing.

He kicks her legs out from under her, cuffs her arms and snarls, “Don’t even try it, bitch.”)

Just car crashes passing in the night, never mind that no-one remembers what cars are, anymore. 

Old Earth has passed into myth and humans have forgotten that they were ever anything but what they are. 

John’s passing her over to the wardens of whatever slam he’s sticking her into, bending low, lips to her ear, whispering, “If you haven’t found me in three months, you owe me dinner.”

Then he shoves her, laughing as she stumbles into the warden, hobbled as she is. She spits at his feet, twists and snarls, “You’re on, asshole!”

+

She makes it in two. 

+

And then he’s gone. 

He’s often gone, gone more often than he’s with her, because sometimes he can’t stand her and sometimes she can’t stand him and they know each other’s deepest, darkest secrets and sometimes it chafes. 

Sometimes, they are to each other whatever the opposite of an anchor is, unmooring each other until they don’t recognize themselves anymore.

So he’s gone a lot. 

But this time, it’s different. This time, decades ticks over without a word, a century, two. 

It scares her.

+

She kills someone. Kills someone and isn’t sure whether or not they deserve it, but they die all the same and she hides, hole in her gut and blood in her eyes and when she wakes from a medically induced coma and a bout of cryo on top of it, it’s in hell. 

Only not, because the last portals collapsed under the strain of the fleeing demons thousands of years ago, leaving the rest of them stranded to die off with humanity or flee up to the stars. 

So this isn’t hell. 

It’s a pretty passable attempt at a replica, though. Her knives are gone, all but the two smallest, and, she wiggles her toes, so are her boots. Those are always the first to go, really. 

She sits up, blinks into the gloom, finds eyes staring back at her. 

It takes her two days (maybe, there’s no daylight) to hunt down all her blades. She doesn’t kill all of the ones that took them, but some of them don’t want to give them back, so she has to and doesn’t care at all.

Her boots, her boots. On a girl who calls herself Kyra, fire in her eyes and a riot of curls on her head and she reminds Buffy of wanttakehave, of pink hair and falling bombs, of Shani, most of all. 

She cocks her head to one side, tucks away her blade and says, “Show me a place to sleep and you can keep the boots.”

The girl frowns, distrustful, but it’s a better deal than this place usually makes. Buffy is tired and her body has already started to adjust for the lack of shoes, cuts and blisters healing over stronger, harder. 

Finally, Kyra snorts. “You’re nuts, lady,” she says, and leads the way. 

+

Sometimes, when Buffy kills one of the guards, they force her into a transport box and stick her with the hellhounds. They’re really more like cats, actually, but no-one listens when she tells them so. 

She likes it up there, in the cages. The ones on either side of her always snuggle up to the bars and she can sleep for a while, with their bodies pressed close, purring softly. 

In the quiet, she dreams up escapes she never executes, because there is no point. Earth is gone and John is gone and Furya is gone, too, now, and this place is like any other place, really. 

Besides, she’d miss the hellhounds. And Shani. _Kyra_.

+

There is screaming and fighting and dying and Buffy pads along the upper catwalks on silent feet to look below and sees a tall, dark man shoulder his way out of the pit, bodies in his wake. 

The Guv watches him go, then flicks his gaze upwards, until he finds Buffy lurking. He cocks his head, so, so and then turns his gaze toward ShaniKyra. 

Buffy nods, because the Guv was good people once, probably, and she understands his warning, drops down into the cell she shares with the girl and decides to keep an eye on her. If the newcomer makes trouble for her friend, she’ll let the hounds eat him. 

Or so she thinks, until it’s feeding time and while she plays tag with the ones she named Reaper and Ripper, she comes across him, the new guy, patting Shredder on the head, a fond expression on his face and his eyes – 

“Oh,” she says, startling both of them. Shredder shakes it off, chuffs at Reaper and then leans into Ripper, siblings, probably, she thinks. They have the same markings. She hip checks all three of them away to lean close, a hand hovering over his face. 

“Lady-,” he starts but she cuts him off. 

“Furyan,” she whispers, inspecting his eyes. This close they look like moons in their own right. “Furyan, mountain tribes, cave dwellers.” She hums a confirmation to herself, closes the last inch between them, her fingers on his temple, framing those should-be-lost eyes. “Alpha,” she concludes, his energy thrumming under her touch. 

He bats her hand away, shoves at her. She takes a step to compensate. Ripper snarls at him and twines around her legs. 

“People keep using that fucking word around me,” the Furyan snarls. “Don’t know what the fuck it means.”

“Alpha?”

“Furyan,” he growls and his voice is like an earthquake, but far less gentle. 

Oh. But he’d be that age, wouldn’t he? A babe when Furya disappeared from all the maps, lost forever. Only she remembers now, and maybe a handful of others. Just like Earth. 

“Home,” she tells him, voice cracking down the middle, and then she runs, three hellhounds on her tail, because his eyes. His goddamn fucking eyes. 

+

There’s fire above their heads and dying and Buffy doesn’t bother using stairs, just leaps for the rope and climbs up after the Fuyian, the one KyraShani calls Riddick. 

Not a Furyan name. 

One of the guards tries to shoot her, so she takes his gun and blows out his brains, steps on another’s hand as he tries to aim at Riddick. Clocks the lone living merc up here, a girl, just like Kyra, with blood on her chin. 

Riddick, across the hole, watches her very quietly. Predator still.

Then the others burst through the door and there is talking and shouting and planning and Kyra says, “She’s coming with us.”

Riddick turns a dark glare on her, then on Buffy. Kyra steps in front of her. “She’s coming,” she repeats and oh, they’re talking about her. 

“Of course I am,” she says.

Riddick growls. “She doesn’t even have fucking shoes. And she’s crazier than Johns on a comedown. Remember Johns, Kyra?”

It’s supposed to be a warning of some sort, but Kyra’s a big girl now, almost no more Shani in her, because Shani was never a warrior, was never this whittled down, and Buffy taught her all sorts of tricks. And Riddick doesn’t know it, but he sees her as pack, Alpha instincts all the way. He’ll give in to her, in the end. 

Must be the werewolf genes, way back in the family tree. 

She meanders up to the merc instead of getting into the fight, holds up her foot against the girl’s boot. Good enough. 

“Sorry,” she says, “I need boots to run.”

The woman snarls something weak. Buffy doesn’t listen, sits down to put on the boots and grimaces at the feeling of them after so long barefoot. 

Riddick watches her. “Bugfuck crazy,” he concludes, but he doesn’t tell her to stay anymore, so he definitely lost that fight. Might still shiv her in the back, but it’s not like that’s going to stick, so they’re cool. Probably.

“Nope,” Buffy tells him. “Just a bit lost. Been too long. Come a bit loose inside,” she wiggles fingers at her temple, closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. Drags all the things she lost back into the light, holds on as tightly as she can. 

She used to think that being with John was being unmoored, but being without him might be worse, in the long run. No-one to remember except her means a whole lot of forgetting and letting go and not having reason to pull it back. 

But Kyra and Riddick, Shani and Furya and Faith and John and maybe she can hold on for a bit.

“Need John,” she mutters shakes herself like a dog and holds up a finger. “We’re taking the hounds.”

This time, Riddick just sighs.

+

Nine inmates, five hellhounds and thirty klicks to freedom. 

They run. 

They run and they run and they run and they lose two hounds and the inmates, one by one by one, until there’s five and three instead and Kyra is falling behind, falling, falling. Before Buffy can think through the cotton in her head, Riddick is already lunging.

Saving her. 

Buffy jumps forward, pulling them when it looks like their momentum won’t carry them far enough, hauling them to safety just as the sun crests the cliff. She goes down on top of Riddick, who takes a moment to study her through his goggles.

She’s not what he expected, she knows. Stuffed down the madness and kept pace with him the whole time, step for step, too much strength in her frame. The others didn’t notice, but like recognizes like. 

“Whose home?” he asks, almost too low to be heard. 

She touches his temple again, quickly, then hauls them both to their feet. 

They reach the hangar and Riddick wants to play a game. 

Buffy grabs Kyra by the arm, presses a spare knife in her palm and says, “We stick together.”

+

Riddick is an immovable object in a fight, letting the enemy come to him and then cutting them down, one by one by one, until there is nothing left. Kyra fights differently, the way Buffy taught her, so they orbit him, small and quick, a whirlwind of blades and punches.

Riddick grabs Kyra, swings her around and around and Buffy goes low on the first pass, high on the second, cutting down what Kyra wounds, and then they fall back into step, round and round and round until – 

Across the battlefield, hair dark and eyes darker, skin as pale as death and a dullness around him like a lost soul and – 

She misses a beat, misses ten, Riddick down, Kyra running, sun rising and – 

Riddick is going to die. 

She won’t let him. 

So she hauls his body into the shade even as the ship leaves, and then there’s another hand, helping her along and this one’s eyes are not the bright moons of an alpha, not mountain tribes, but something else, something just as _furious_ , under all the dullness of fake-death. 

He speaks to Riddick, gives him a knife, and then turns to her, still stripping. “They taught us about you,” he says, a smile on his pale face. “The first of the queens.”

“No,” she counters. “Not a queen.”

His smile grows wider. “An Alpha and a queen,” he muses. “Perhaps we will be avenged after all.”

And then he’s blown away on the winds as the fire eats his bones. 

+

“You’re from Furya,” Riddick says, during the long trek through space, toward Kyra and John.

“No,” she corrects. “But I lived there for a while.” 

She touches her belly, stupid tell, and he squints at her for the longest time before turning back to the consoles. He doesn’t remind her of anyone, gruff and raw as he is, and she’s ridiculously grateful for that. 

+

They make it into the big ship just before it takes off, and while Riddick challenges the big wig, Buffy follows Kyra toward the edge of the room. 

“Did they get you?” she asks, because something about the dullness in her eyes, about the way she holds herself, is off.

“Lord Vaako took me to the chambers himself,” Kyra answers, a meaningful look toward the balcony across the way and Buffy exhales, long and slow. Vaako. John. Okay, then. Okay.

She’s still doing that when the girl brushes past her, toward the battle by the throne. She attacks the bad guy from behind, gets thrown and – Buffy manages, barely, to buffer her fall, block her from the worst of it, spike through the belly, oh, look, she’s been impaled. 

Kyra blanches as she falls to the ground, but she’s alive, she’s okay, she’s fine and the man who killed Furya dies screaming and then John is there, gently pulling her free. 

“God, you’re a mess,” he mutters as Riddick bellows until the room empties. John and Kyra stretch her out on the cold floor, John’s thigh beneath her head, turned to one side so she can spit blood instead of choke on it. 

Punctured lung. Awesome. 

He strips off a heavy glove to run a hand through her hair. Kyra flutters beside them, frantic. Riddick puts a hand on her shoulder, kneels.

“You two know each other?”

John shrugs, she can feel it, and she spits more blood. Burrows into him as she breathes shallowly.

“What the hell happened to you, Buffy?” John wants to know.

She shrugs. Kyra is trying to wad fabric against her wound, but Riddick pulls her back. He knows a kill wound when he sees one. Pointless.

“You weren’t there.” She coughs. “Turns out I’m worse without you than I am with you.”

He sighs, looks around at this tomb he’s been living on, says, “Yeah, me, too. Shack up again?”

Casual. Never been good with words, her John. 

“I’m keeping them.” She waves a hand toward the others, who watch, silent now, and confused. 

John laughs. “A little girl and a Furyan. Never could resist either of them, could you?”

Speaking as someone who has been both and lost it, she says, “No.”

Then she dies for a little. 

+

When she wakes, she’s bedded in the Lord Marshall’s chambers, a hellhound on either side of her, Kyra sitting cross-legged at her feet. John has color in his face and less armor on his shoulders, slouched in a chair next to Riddick, Shredder at his knee.

All of them waiting for her. 

Beneath them all, the engines hum loudly. 

“Where are we going?” Buffy asks as she sits up enough to let Kyra hug her tightly. Ripper nudges her thigh, whining pitifully. 

John shrugs, grins his half grin, car crash grin, even if no-one remembers cars anymore. 

Riddick stops playing with his ulaks long enough to meet her gaze with his own and say, “Home. We’re going home.”

It’s not an eighties romcom happy ending (not that anyone remembers what that is, either), mostly because it’s not an ending. Her and John are still what they are and even with Furyans living centuries longer than most humans, this little bubble of family will burst far too soon. 

Everything they were will still be lost and there’ll still be them, her and John, John and her, Harry and Sally for the fucking space age of pirates and tyrants.

But. 

Home. 

It does have a certain equity. 

+

+

**Author's Note:**

> Come tumble with me as wordsformurder, or leave me a comment. Or both. Both is better.


End file.
